Depositor stories

"How researchers have tackled the task of archiving their challenging data"

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Sharing data may be a simple task but it may unearth some complex issues that need to be thought through carefully.

View our short videos made with some of our key depositing organisations, including Natcen, DECC and ISER and the academics who collect the Skills and employment Survey series.

Our staff have advised many hundreds of depositors from government departments to academics on how to prepare and, where necessary, protect data. While we provide detailed guidelines for data producers on many of the key issues surrounding data preparation, we appreciate that some of the same questions crop up time and time again. These tend to involve the challenges of consent, exceptionally sensitive data, uncertainty about 'how much' anonymisation to do, and more.

To point to successful archiving of these kinds of collections, we have collated some 'depositor stories' that describe how researchers have tackled the task of archiving their data.

Various issues have been encountered, and successfully overcome, including:

where archiving has not been planned from the project's inception

'sensitive' data

involving the research team during archiving work

long time lapses between doing the research and preparing the data for archiving

balancing confidentiality with the usefulness of the data

addressing the challenges of retrospective consent

These researchers are to be congratulated for their efforts on making their data shareable.